Is the vast army of the self-employed in low income countries a source of employment generation? We use data from surveys in Sri Lanka to compare the characteristics of own account workers (non-employers) with wage workers and with owners of larger firms. We use a rich set of measures of...

Sri Lanka's population is predicted to age very fast during the next 50 years, bringing a slowdown of labor force growth and after 2030 its contraction. Based on an original, 2006 representative survey of old people in Sri Lanka conducted as a part of this study, the paper examines labor market...

Current approaches of measuring vulnerability to natural hazards generally use a rather static perspective that focuses on a single point in time - often before a hazardous event occurs. In contrast, the paper argues that vulnerability assessment should also take into account the changing...

Reducing child malnutrition is a key goal of most developing countries. To combat child malnutrition with the right set of interventions, policymakers need to have a better understanding of its economic, social and policy determinants. While there is a large literature that investigates the...

This paper argues that the level of financial services provision determines the risk management strategies among the poor. The paper estimates the determinants of the household's use of one, two or all three types of microfinancial services applying ordered probit models and additionally probit...

Microinsurance is an emerging concept protecting households from the potentially catastrophic expenditures associated with family related shocks. Therefore, this paper presents evidence on the determinants of insurance participation using probit models on household survey data from Sri Lanka,...

In a recent randomized experiment we found mean returns to capital of between 5 and 6 percent per month in Sri Lankan microenterprises, much higher than market interest rates. But returns were found to be much higher among men than among women, and indeed were not different from zero for women....

The paper provides an assessment of India's role in the final years of the civil war in Sri Lanka (2003-2009). In particular, it looks for explanations for India's inability to act as a conflict manager in its own region, which is in contrast to predominant assumptions about the role of powerful...

Using dynamic econometric techniques the paper investigates the determinants of private saving in Sri Lanka with a primary focus on the role of financial sector development. Empirical evidence is obtained indicating the existence of the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis, and the significance of...